You mean you CAN DEMAND a new phone for the shitty one they conned you into buying!?! God, I am such a naive doormat sometimes!
The woman who got banned from Filene’s was on some tv show crying about how cruel the Filene’s people were to her. I thought their letter was perfectly polite, myself. In the situation, I would have been hard pressed to be so tactful.
I bet this isn’t the end of it. Or the article isn’t telling everything.
How can it be legal to determine how many is “too many” without having a storewide policy?
I mean this company just up and decides “OKAY, out of all of our x number of customers, these two have just had too many returns and complaints”.
I mean, “excessive returns” is really vague. Not once in the article do they show how many they consider “too many” nor is there any information regarding whether perhaps their “problems with managers” were maybe over the top or something.
Somehow I think there’s more to the story than just “too many returns”.
Maybe because they don’t want to publicize the numbers? If you knew you could return stuff 15 times in a month–and you were a chronic returner–you’d just return stuff 14 times and then wait til next month.
WOW! I had NO idea. I’d always thought of the word “gypsy” as merely describing the beautiful and colorfully dressed people who travel and have unique jobs (such as fortune telling, music, entertainment and the like).
I DID know that “gyp” was a slur. But didn’t realize that “gypsy” was so hated by the Romany (sp?) people themselves. As far as I know, no Romany people travel up to my neck of the woods, so all I know of them has been the small amount I’ve read, or maybe seen in a movie or too
Thanks for the enlightening info.
Re: Gypsies. I think this is all in the context. The word itself isn’t wrong, like for eg. the dreaded n word. However, it is if it’s used out of context that it is tainted - ie. if it is used as a derogatory word.
As an analogy (and I hope you’ll forgive the crude way I put this to make the point), when I was at school being called ‘gay’ was a slur thrown around at random. Of course, gays openly call each other gay and it doesn’t have the same connotations at all.
Actually I remember an incident when some ‘tough guy’ at school called me a ‘girl’. An older girl standing nearby towered over him and said ‘and what’s wrong with being a girl?’. He ran!! I laughed.
Our store (a Dominos) instituted a ‘No new pizza unless you give us 75% od the old one bacl’ policy. Cut returns down dramatically (actual conversation I once had: “What do you mean, you want most of it back! We already ate it!” Me: “Then it must not have been as bad as you claim it was, huh?” [I had no problem being rude to jerks])
I’m sure their policy has a fairly standard “reserve the right to refuse service at any time” statement in it. They’re a private business - as long as they’re not discriminating on the basis of race or anything, they don’t have to serve everybody.
As for telling customers to not return just for too many returns - you bet it happens all the time. As I posted earlier in the thread, my sister-in-law has worked for a number of department stores, and has seen those letters written up, and occasionally written some herself. I’ve also had conversations with her coworkers who have had experience in other department stores, and said the same thing. When you get people who routinely return hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of items - especially when it’s after your store no longer carries that item and thus can’t try to resell it for full value - that causes a ton of hassle and lost profitability. Start showing bad sales weeks as a result and the corporate office will take notice - and they don’t care if that’s the result of returns, they will want the reason fixed ASAP or heads will roll.
lawoot there’s a reason its called Pizza Slut. Get your ass sucked and mediocre pizza at the same time! (But they are the largest franchise in my area)
My sister was an assistant manager at Wal mart, first here in Utah and later in Washington State. She relates stories of people wanting to make exchanges that will make your skin crawl. My favorite was the guy who found a receipt in the parking lot, she says this happens a lot, for some expensive audio equipment. Brought the receipt into the store, found the equipment and proceeded to try to “return” it for cash.
Nan: “Sir, I am not going to honor this receipt. I dont think you bought this equipment.”
Customer: “But you have to honor the receipt! Its your policy!”
Nan: “No, I don’t. This receipt has tire tracks on it! I think you found it.”
Customer: “Fine!”
Nan says he shoved the cart into the counter and stormed off in a huff.
Return policies and the floral industry:
Every guy in the world will do this one. “I ordered a dozen roses and they didn’t open. They died after 2 days.” Ok, I ask the driver if the vase was full. Yes. I call the recipient.
(1) Did you keep the vase filled with water when you took the roses home? She didn’t take them home. She left them at the office. Where the AC is turned off at 5 and doesn’t cycle back on until 5 the next AM to cool down the building for the day. 2 days spent mostly hot, yeah, they’re dead. We replace, with warning to TAKE HOME. Keep vase filled with cool water.
(2)Did you keep the vase… “No, i didn’t want it to spill in my car, so I poured the water out.” Drive home, maybe a stop, with the roses out of water. No recut to the dried out stems. They die for a reason. We still replace, with warnings.
(3) Took 'em home, set them on the TV. Instant-on TV, hot all the time. Boiled them. We replace, with warnings.
(4) Took 'em home, kept the vase METICULOUSLY clean. Bleach in the water. (Bleach repels water, keeps it out of the stems, burns the roses with chlorine.) We replace, with warnings.
And they scream like we were killing them if we ask to have the vase and the roses back…on the odd chance that there WAS a problem with the product, and we could get the wholesaler to honor the replacement. Of course, the number of times we’ve gotten back Not-our-vase with not-our-roses…yeah he ordered flom us, but somebody else sent roses as well, and HE saw the dead ones…
Then there are the Olympic Medal Winning skaters with hip replacements who call to return the roses her father sent her mother for their anniversary because SHE bought them flowers on her way in from the airport. 30 premium LONG stemmed roses, rush ordered during a wedding prep, done and delivered in 45 minutes, and the little beeyoch puts them out on the porch in the sun AFTER being told to keep them cool until we could get there.
Customers suck. Cheap-ass lying customers suck most.
You regularly get Olympic athletes as customers?
The store where I work has two “customers”, a middle-aged woman and her daughter, who frequently return small, high-priced items, saying they’ve lost the receipt. We give store credit without a receipt. They then “purchase” other items with their credit. Problem is, no one remembers ever having sold the original items to these women. We have only ten employees, and we remember regular customers. Our cameras haven’t caught them shoplifting, but last time they came in I “shadowed” them, and they left in a hurry without buying anything, and haven’t been back. Our manager says we can’t set a limit on the number of returns customers can make without a receipt as long as they accept store credit.
Recently I waited in line in the housewares dept. at Dillard while a woman returned several items. From her conversation with the sales associate, it was clear this was a frequent occurance. Later I saw the associate in the food court and chatted with her. She said she believes the customer with multiple returns is lonely, and this is her way of finding social interaction. I was impressed by her kindness and understanding in this particular situation.
But – there are lots of different kinds of returns. I’m friends with the manager of a women’s clothing store in the mall who hates Mondays because that’s when the clothes she sold on Saturday come back. One woman wore an outfit out of the store on Saturday, saying she was on her way to a party, then attempted to return it on Monday, saying it didn’t fit and she hadn’t worn it. The manager said, “Ma’am, I cut the tags off this outfit on Saturday, while you were wearing it!”
The customer announced loudly that she’d never shop there again, and my friend asked sweetly, “Ma’am, is that a real promise or just an idle threat?”
The worst I’ve heard of: a customer told me she works with a woman who brings greeting cards to her co-workers for birthdays, anniversaries, etc. that are unsigned, with no name on the envelope. She tells them that’s so they can “recycle” them – pass them on to someone else. But then she sneaks her cards back from the pile and returns them to the store!
Oh sure you can. I did when I got a new phone for my GF’s account (that’s in my name). I went back to the store, said the phone didn’t get a signal from her home when it should, and they swapped it out no prob.
That’s, of course, different than exchanging a phone because you don’t like the colour. Also, we have a 30 minute policy, if you use it for more than 30 minutes, you cannot return it. It makes perfect sense to me, why the hell can’t customers think so???
I’m glad I don’t deal with customers anymore. They suck.
I work in a frame store, and recently we had a real problem customer.
We used to have a time guarantee on our framing orders, but the did away with that about three months ago. Apparently our ad in the phone book still states it.
So this guy comes in to have a large quantity of original artwork framed from an artist friend of his. Mr. Asshole Customer is a Dr. and apparently has some sort of entitlement, I never pay retail attitude about him. He progresses to get in a row with my boss over the charges to properly mount the artwork, insist on matting and frame mouldings that are not appropriate to the size of the artwork (not visually, but as in, this has a high risk of falling apart on the wall). I wish I had been there because I would’ve really gotten in a good arguement with him, that might’ve resulted in me getting reprimanded, but certainly not fired. My boss, being above me, has to be much more diplomatic. So this fellow essentially bullies himself into about a 40% discount on almost $2000.00 worth of custom framing.
When he placed the order, we told him it would take longer than expected because we did not currently have glass the sizes that he needed in stock. He acknowledged that he was aware of that. Three days before it was due, my assistant manager called to remind him that it would be a couple of extra days as we were waiting for the glass. He didn’t call back until the day they were “due,” which he had been informed was not an actual due date, and when he was told they weren’t completed yet, he demanded his frame mouldings for free on TOP of everything he has already gotten for free. When my boss told him he was absolutely not getting it, the guy actually said, “Oh come on, JinBoss, don’t make me do anything to complain to corporate about you. You and I both know I am going to get this for free.”
I should add that this guy also verbally abused the Yugoslavian girl that works out on the sales counter, as I like her quite a bit and she is most sensitive, I was extremely upset by that and already wanting to rip the guy’s jugular vein out with my teeth. Her English is a bit choppy, but she is a very good designer and makes less errors than almost anyone that might go out there… and I should add… pissing off the people who will be handling your massive amounts of artwork is NOT the way to have things done properly.
I am happy in the knowledge that his frames are so skinny they will likely fall apart within a few months. He was told that they would not be stable, but was such an obnoxious asshole that they finally sighed and said “Oookay.” It’s not as if he will be able to ask for any money back. We lost so much money on this guy – basically, all he paid for, on $2000.00 of framing, was about $300 worth of glass. Everything else he has managed to bitch his way into getting for free.
My boss will be telling him that we’re not accepting any future “business” from him.
I am contemplating trying to look up the name of the artist that he was framing these for on Google, and tell her what he did to us. Undoubtedly he was trying to do her a grand and generous “favour” by having all these framed…
I wish I would’ve been the one out there that day he came in, though.